The Second Strain

by John Burke

  He said: ‘You don’t want him to come, do you? You’re the one who doesn’t want him to come.’

  ‘It’s been lovely seeing you again, Nick.’ It might have been a sardonic echo of his own remark. ‘Sorry it’s all come to nothing.’

  Chapter Five

  Detective Inspector Lesley Gunn drove into the cramped car park beside Kilstane police station and sat in it for a few moments, taking deep breaths and trying to persuade herself that she was perfectly capable of facing the snide grins and mutterings her return was bound to provoke.

  The desk sergeant confirmed her worst suspicions. He greeted her courteously but with a conspiratorial grin showing that he remembered her all right.

  ‘Glad to see you back, inspector. We’d heard you’d be visiting us again.’

  Yes, you could bet they had.

  A young man in a leather jacket, pink striped shirt and chalky chinos had been sitting on the bench facing the desk. He might have been someone waiting to be charged, or a relative come to bail out a suspect. Instead, when he saw her, he got up and said: ‘Good morning, guv. Sergeant Elliot.’

  He had a pleasant face with sandy freckles, marred only by a deep purple scar down one cheek.

  ‘I was told I could call on you if necessary,’ said Lesley. ‘Didn’t expect you to be on the spot when I got here.’

  ‘Thought I’d like to welcome you to our patch. And I get bored just sitting at home.’

  ‘Oh, one of those. Always fidgeting to get down to the nitty-gritty?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, guv.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been told not to give you a relapse. Let’s take it slowly. And first of all, let’s find someone to fill us in on the situation.’

  ‘I’ve already done a bit of a recce.’

  There was nothing pushy or complacent about it. She could tell at once that he was conscientious by nature, and would have done as much of the groundwork as possible because that was his job, and he was committed to his job.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit down somewhere and go over what we’ve got.’

  The police surgeon’s report was the obvious starting point. ‘Only a stopgap, until they’ve chipped the body out,’ said Elliot.

  ‘Chipped it out?’

  ‘You’d better come and see, guv.’

  Elliot’s car was outside, waiting. In his quiet way he did seem to have organized everything without waiting to be asked.

  Kilstane Community Hospital mortuary did not usually accommodate corpses in quite such a weighty shroud. Lesley had expected a body damaged by falling masonry, but this one was not the least like that. It was encased in concrete, which was itself enclosed in a wide, twisted metal tube. Not enough of the head was visible to attempt any identification.

  Elliot anticipated her thoughts. ‘There’s every likelihood that a lot of the head and body will be crushed out of recognition.’

  ‘Dental records?’

  ‘When we can get down to what’s left of his mouth.’

  ‘Is someone assigned to that?’

  ‘He’s due to be carted off to the pathology lab in Gilliskirk this afternoon.’

  Lesley studied the twisted conglomeration of human remains, concrete, and metal. It would take time and a great deal of care to remove first the tubular casing and then the concrete shroud without damaging the contents further. She had heard of gang-land killings when the victim was weighted down with concrete and dumped into a river, but killings by feuding gangs in the Borders belonged to an earlier century.

  ‘Shifting that must have taken some doing,’ she mused.

  ‘Shovelling him down that pipe and then pouring concrete in on him.’ The sergeant nodded agreement. ‘I wouldn’t have thought one man could do it on his own.’

  ‘No. And where was this mish-mash found?’

  Elliot drove her back into town and parked alongside the Academy railings. A pump was thudding away, draining water from under the playground. A young man in a tweed suit, supervising the work, watched the car draw up, and nodded recognition at the sergeant.

  ‘Back on the beat, Rab? Not ready for early retirement?’

  ‘Not yet, Mr Kerr.’ He stood aside to let Lesley move forward. ‘This is Detective Inspector Gunn. Mr William Kerr.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Kerr shook hands with what threatened to become a knowing squeeze. ‘You were the one who dug out a few little fallacies in our Common Riding, right?’

  Lesley had known even before she got here that she wouldn’t be popular. After the part she had played in exposing the folly of their annual charade she would be regarded either as a bad joke or as a wretched destroyer of tradition. There was no way she was going to be popular. Her only course was to be tough with them before they could decide how to make things difficult for her. Tough from the word go. Let them get the measure of it right from the start.

  ‘I’ve seen the tubing and what’s in it.’ She waved towards the pump. ‘As you seem to be in charge of operations here, Mr Kerr, perhaps you can suggest how that came to be in the building.’

  ‘I had no responsibility for the tower end of the building. That work was done a few years ago. Current renovations have been mainly connected with inserting larger windows in the hall and providing a direct entrance from the old playground. The passage to the back door, past what had once been the outside lavatories, was removed at the time of Buchanan’s work. Before I was involved,’ Kerr added heavily.

  ‘And when was that?

  ‘That would have been in 1981.’ There was no hesitation in Kerr’s answer. It implied an accusation.

  ‘The metal surround to the concrete and the . . . the remains. Where would that have come from?’

  ‘It was obviously the extractor from the old kitchens on that side.’

  ‘But how could anyone have shoved a body into it and then been able to pour concrete into it? I mean, if it was above the kitchens, it must have been at a certain height. You can’t heave a concrete mixer up on your shoulders and start pouring.’

  ‘At the time of those earlier renovations, there would have been scaffolding up the whole side of the building. Bound to have been a mixer up there at some stage. You’ll have to ask Buchanan.’ It was said with a touch of anticipatory malice.

  Lesley glanced at Sergeant Elliot. He smiled a silent assurance that this, too, could be arranged without difficulty.

  Enoch Buchanan’s premises had been a familiar eyesore when Lesley Gunn did her probationary period in Kilstane, and when she came back for the Black Knowe theft investigation. If it had changed at all since those early encounters, it was only by an accumulation of recent dust and sawdust on the rigid tidiness which the owner imposed on everything in the world under his command. His office was an oblong shed constructed long before the days of portakabins, propped on stilts against one wall of the yard with six steps and a polished handrail up to it.

  Buchanan opened the door as Lesley set foot on the top step. He nodded curt recognition at Elliot, but didn’t wait for the sergeant to make any introductions.

  ‘Och, aye.’ He was a broader, more bristling Scot than young Kerr. ‘And wouldn’t I be remembering you as —’

  ‘I’m sure you would.’ She bristled right back at him. ‘But what I’d like you to remember right now, Mr Buchanan, is exactly what could have enabled somebody — or somebodies — to insert a corpse into the renovations I understand you were carrying out in 1981.’

  ‘And who’d ha’ been giving ye to understand that?’

  She wasn’t going to get involved in local squabbles. ‘The important point, Mr Buchanan, is that it couldn’t have been an accident. So do you remember who was working on the site at the time and would have had the facilities to kill someone and conceal the body in an aluminium flue without your being aware of it.’

  ‘I can’t be everywhere at every minute of the day.’

  ‘Of course not. But I was hoping you might remember something unusual — odd behaviour on the part of one or tw
o of your employees around that time, signs of a shortage of material, any rumours that might have been floating around.’

  ‘I’ve had plenty of different men working for me since then. Cannae keep track of each and every one. Nae staying power, these youngsters nowadays.’

  Patiently Lesley said: ‘I presume you have records of your employees at certain periods.’

  ‘If they haven’t all been thrown out.’

  ‘Mr Buchanan, I’d be most grateful if you could take the time to go through your records and let me know anything that strikes you. Something or someone you may have forgotten, and then all at once you get to remembering.’

  ‘And where would I be finding the time to do that? I’ve got a business to run, ye ken.’

  DS Elliot said: ‘I’d be happy to sit in with you, Mr Buchanan. Save a lot of time that way.’

  ‘Well, I’m nae sure that —’

  ‘Sergeant Elliot’s trained eye would be a great asset,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Hmph. Well.’ It was neither an acceptance nor a refusal. Buchanan was not a man to give way gracefully. ‘And what’ll be the point of it all? Someone dead all those years back — what would that have to do with us now?’

  ‘That’s what we intend to find out. It’s not simply a matter of someone having a heart attack on a hillside and lying there undiscovered for ages. Nor was it an industrial accident that someone’s tried to cover up. At least, I assume that’s not the case?’

  ‘And what would ye be implying by that, miss? There’s precious few accidents on any of my jobs, let me tell you that. And nane of them would be covered up.’

  ‘In which case,’ Lesley persevered, ‘we have to start looking around for a different sort of murder suspect. Because murder it has to be. That body wasn’t trapped by accident. It was squeezed into the metal cylinder —’

  ‘The old school kitchen flue,’ Buchanan reluctantly corroborated.

  ‘Why did nobody notice it was no longer functioning properly?’

  ‘It wasnae meant to. Not any longer. Our brief at the time was to modernize the rest of the building, do away with the outside lavatories and install new ones, and extend the school hall. For all the good that turned out to be. All that money spent, and then only these few years later they were turning it into a warehouse and bussing the weans to Rowanbie. Of all the half-witted —’

  ‘Yes.’ Lesley steered him back to the matter in hand. ‘The kitchen flue, Mr Buchanan.’

  ‘Aye, well. The kitchens were gutted and new ones added in that single-storey extension. There was no way of using the tower, which was always a bit of a nuisance anyway, the way old MacLean just jammed it on. The flue went through it. Not worth the trouble of stripping the flue out and having to make good. Just seal up the outer end.’

  Lesley had a brief vision of how young Kerr would have reacted to that admission.

  ‘And before that was done,’ she said, ‘it would have been possible for someone to get up the scaffolding and pour concrete in? Which must have been a tricky operation. You must have wondered about it recently, once the body was discovered.’

  ‘Aye, everyone’s done a fine lot o’ wondering.’

  ‘And you haven’t had time to think of anybody you know who might have disappeared around that time?’

  Buchanan made a show of heaving a large file off a rickety shelf and flicking through it without enthusiasm. A faint wisp of dust drifted across the office like a cluster of midges.

  Suddenly he pushed the file away and began tugging at the spiny hairs below his left ear. ‘Now, I’d not be wanting to say there was anything to it . . .’

  ‘To what, Mr Buchanan?’

  ‘It could have been about that time that Jamie Lowther went south. Though I dinna see what —’

  ‘Lowther? Do you know where he’s living now?’

  ‘From what I heard, he died some years back. And then his son came back.’

  ‘His son?’

  ‘Young Lowther. Adam. Married down there, then brought her back here.’

  ‘Where might I find him?’

  ‘The music shop along the way,’ said Elliot. ‘Used to be a bookshop, but there was a fire about the time of . . .’ He stopped, embarrassed.

  Buchanan was far from embarrassed. ‘Aye, ye’ll remember the bookshop, lass? All tied in with that trouble ye stirred up.’

  Lesley remembered. It was irrelevant. Struggling to keep things on track, she said: ‘Did this Jamie Lowther work for you?’

  ‘Kept our accounts, aye. Good at drawing up contracts, and keeping an eye on things. Left me in a spot, going off as quickly as he did. But,’ he finished piously, ‘I’d not be wishing to make ill surmises about the dead.’

  The phone rang. Buchanan grunted a response, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘This will take some time.’ It was a clear request for them to get off the premises.

  Crossing the yard, Elliot said: ‘Incidentally it was young Lowther’s wife who was first on the scene when the tower came down. Got laid out by a few chunks of it.’

  ‘One of those weird coincidences? Anyway, I think it might be worth checking whether there were any Mispers circulating locally around the time this Lowther quit town, which might tie in with the date of that flue being blocked off.’

  *

  The window of the music shop had a display of classical CDs up both sides, and a more widely spaced selection along the front. The most prominent were recordings of Daniel Erskine’s music, and behind them was propped up an open score of a composition by Erskine called The Drummer of Cortachy.

  There had been some alterations to the building since she last saw it. The outer flight of steps to the first floor had been removed, and a new access sheltered under the covered pend on the other side. The shop door had been widened, and its glass pane was filled with a poster announcing a concert of Daniel Erskine’s music. As Elliot opened it to let her in, they were greeted by a spiky string serenade from two speakers hanging on the far wall. Racks of piano music filled the space between the speakers, and to her right was a glass cabinet with violin and guitar strings, clarinet reeds, and a couple of recorders. CDs and cassettes rose halfway up the wall to her left. Stacked in one corner as if to keep them well away from more serious musical items were three stratocasters with glistening multi-coloured metal inlays. An upright piano sheltered behind a screen which she suspected the owner might have made at school, covered with a collage of cut-out pictures of composers, conductors, and instruments. In every space on the walls were posters announcing the forthcoming Gathering or advertising recordings of Daniel Erskine’s compositions.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  From the shadows at the back of the shop a youngish middle-aged man stepped out into the light. Lesley summed him up swiftly into one of her artistic categories. This one in the manner of John Hazlitt’s portrait of his brother William, intense and earnest, with faint permanent shadows under the eyes and a tendency to hold his head sideways, as if listening critically with his left ear.

  She held out her warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Gunn. And this is Sergeant Elliot.’

  ‘Oh.’ It conveyed neither surprise nor alarm as he shook hands. ‘Adam Lowther. You’re here about our corpse, I suppose.’ He could be simply disappointed that she wasn’t about to buy some sheet music or a recent CD.

  ‘Yes. We’re trying to identify it, or to collect information which may lead to identification and a possible reason for its — er — incarceration.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can help. We’ve all discussed it, of course — the whole town, I mean — but it’s all a mystery. I’ve no more idea than anybody else.’

  ‘Mr Buchanan said your wife was injured when the tower collapsed.’

  ‘Only slightly, yes.’

  ‘He thought you might be able to shed some light on it.’

  ‘Did he?’ Lowther looked irritated. ‘Why should he suppose that?’

  ‘Your father was Jamie Lowther?’
/>   ‘He was. He died four years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  Lowther looked around vaguely, and dragged forward the only chair in the shop. Lesley shook her head with a polite smile. There was an awkward pause. She broke it:

  ‘You and your father were here at the time of the . . . mysterious death?’

  ‘Were we? I mean, you know when it happened, then?’

  ‘It seems reasonable to suppose that it was during the conversions carried on by Mr Buchanan and his builders. I gather your father worked for him.’

  ‘He did. In the office.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I was still at the Academy. Having a few music lessons,’ he said with a surge of pride, ‘with Mr Erskine. Before he became famous.’

  Lesley caught a flash of interest in Sergeant Elliot’s eye. But, like herself, he knew better than to give any suppositions away.

  Adam Lowther was obviously glad of any excuse to talk about his favourite topic. ‘Mr Erskine’s father was rector of the Academy during the war and afterwards. Daniel Erskine had to do his National Service after the war, and then came back here to teach at the Academy. He was a wonderful teacher. My father wasn’t keen on me spending so much time on music, but it was wonderful. And then we left.’

  ‘Why did your father decide to leave Kilstane?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The resentment was still throbbing there. ‘We just packed up and left. Said there was better work down in England. It wasn’t all that much better, if you ask me.’

  ‘And you went to school there?’

  ‘In Leeds. And when I left, I got a job in a piano showroom. Tuning pianos, repairing, selling music. Until my mother and father died, and I heard there were these premises for sale, and I could come back to Kilstane and set up on my own.’

  ‘You manage to make a living. Rather specialized, in a small community like this, isn’t it?’

  ‘I do regular piano tuning. Playing the piano or the organ at weddings and that sort of thing. Setting up amplification for local events. I could have expanded. I was offered a franchise for installing and maintaining and replacing jukeboxes and fruit machines in the pubs and cafés for ten miles around. But I didn’t fancy that line.’ The music from the speakers suddenly stopped. ‘That was Erskine’s Selkie of Wastness,’ he said reverently.